Robert: I didn’t think anyone could top Yale for live nudity and sleaze, but I think Northwestern is giving it a run for its money.

Having read the comment thread on your recent post about live sex acts in class at Northwestern, I’d like to take the level of criticism a little further. Let me speak up for the “Victorians” of the world and say that J. Michael Bailey should be fired for bringing that kind of sleaze into the university. Tenure and academic freedom should not give one a license to make a mockery of the very idea of higher learning. Bailey’s attempt to “understand sexual diversity” by turning his classroom into the equivalent of a back-alley sex shop is absurd and not at all intellectually credible. What he did is as useless as it is perverse. It’s also harmful because of the message it sends — basically reducing women to sex objects. In this sense, it potentially harms even the students who chose not to attend.

The saddest thing about this story is what it reveals about our society. We now have an academic culture in this country so liberal and so morally adrift that someone like Bailey is convinced he can get away with live sex in class. Indeed, my guess is, when all is said and done, he will get away with it.

I’ve never met Bailey, so I can’t speak decisively about his character or intentions. But his actions speak volumes. I encountered a couple of men who taught similar courses when I was in college. Someone needs to point out the obvious here. The parade of porn and explicit sex streaming through our universities these days has nothing to do with education, and everything to do with the creepy desires of a lot of randy old professors, who lack self-restraint, and, in my experience, seem entirely too eager to experience sexual situations alongside young guys and girls 40 years their junior.